Mentoring

Mentoring is a reciprocal and collaborative at-will relationship that most often occurs between a senior and junior employee for the purpose of the mentee's growth, learning, and career development.

This is required to both achieve your own goals as well as guide others towards achieving their goals.

The key here are goals. This is personal and subjective in nature.

A personal rapport is necessary to have with your mentor and mentee, due to this reason. For a mentor, it is vital for them to be attentive listeneners, looking for non-verbal cues and unspoken elements of their mentees. For mentees it is vital to remain on topic, evaluate and introspect their own changes. Mentees need to utilise their mentors for brainstorming ways to improve. This involves being open to collaborate and ideas on both sides.

This helps achieve personal development and growth at both ends.

SMART planning

For any career a roadmap is necessary. Each roadmap needs to have milestones. The distance travelled to reach a milestone is measured by goals.

For an effective roadmap, it is vital to have effective goals.

The SMART framework provides a method of goal setting. SMART goals are supposed to be :

1. Small
2. Measurable
3. Achievable
4. Relevant
5. Time bound

It is important to set goals to achieve milestones.

Starting on a journey

For anyone starting out on a journey, it is vital to know their starting point and their destination.

Understanding the starting point requires baselining, i.e. understanding the technical, behavioural and organizational skills possessed by an individual.

Understanding the destination requires the following :

1. Mentees' awareness of their respective selections
2. Mentees' understanding of the value provided by a selection
3. Mentees' belief/resolution in the chosen destination

Once these are done, the next step is to set milestones. Milestones are moderately long term goals, approximately 6 months to 1.5 years in duration.

These are hard goals that need to be achieved in a short term in order to succesfully achieve a career path.

They can be things such as :

• Completing AWS certification
• Mentoring X individuals
• Working on Y negotiations
• Developing N Proposals

Traversing a journey

This is a development effort and as should be worked upon as any development project. A recommended method is to use Personal Scrum.

Scrum provides the following advantages :

1. It is iterative
2. It is flexible and adaptable
3. Encourages breaking larger tasks into smaller ones
4. Retrospectives

Steps to use it :

1. Create your task backlog
2. Prioritize your backlog
   • use Eisenhower Matrix, MoSCoW prioritization or a simple prioritization
3. Plan your sprint
4. Start the sprint
5. Hold the retro

Eisenhower Matrix :

	Unimportant	Important
Not Urgent	Delete	Decide
Urgent	Delegate	Do

MoSCoW prioritization, involves dividing goals into must haves, should haves, could haves or won't haves.

Once the roadmap is created, milestones set, goals decided upon, use the matrix or MoSCoW to prioritize and iteratively work upon goals.

Ending a journey

When you're done with a journey, it does not ends there, and that is not the end of life. On reaching your destination it is vital for you to relax, unwind and explore the destination, before setting out on a new journey. What this means is :

1. Stay on the role for some time
2. Practice while connecting with others
3. Research several aspects of the profession
4. Use your findings to guide others, so that you can enjoy it with similar natured individuals